E. O. Wilson Quotes

A race is what zoologists term a variety or subdivision of a species.

Most people are surprised when they hear my somber figures: we know of 2 million species of plants, animals and microorganisms, and we can give them each a scientific name and a diagnostic description. We know, perhaps generously, more than just a little bit of the anatomy in no more than 10 percent. We have done thorough studies in fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent. And the total number of species on Earth is unknown to the nearest order of magnitude.

The living world is not a single array... connected by unbroken series of intergrades.

The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other, for the simple reason that there are nearly 300,000 species of beetle known, and perhaps more, as compared with somewhat less than 9,000 species of birds and a little over 10,000 species of mammals.

Wonderful theory, wrong species.

To many people, 'biodiversity' is almost synonymous with the word 'nature,' and 'nature' brings to mind steamy forests and the big creatures that dwell there. Fair enough. But biodiversity is much more than that, for it encompasses not only the diversity of species, but also the diversity within species.

Most of the things at the zoo don't look like us. We're one design that works. Our chimp pals sort of look like us, so that's a different take on the same basic design. But fish don't look like us, and giraffes don't. They look a little like us, but not too much. And insects certainly don't look like us, and they work just fine.

Cuvier had preceded Lamarck in specifying the kinds and degrees of variation, which his own observations and critical judgment of the reports of others led him to admit.

I had found again and again that the most aberrant population of a species - often having reached species rank, and occasionally classified even as a separate genus - occurred at a peripheral location, indeed usually at the most isolated peripheral location.

But naturalists are now beginning to look beyond this, and to see that there must be some other principle regulating the infinitely varied forms of animal life.

Unfortunately, with dinosaurs, we haven't had enough specimens to determine how much variation there is within a species.

It's always been a dream of mine, of exploring the living world, of classifying all the species and finding out what makes up the biosphere.

I can pretty much name and rattle off the genus and species of all the bugs you see in everyday life.

A whale is as unique as a cactus. But don't ask a whale to survive Death Valley. We all have special gifts. Where we use them and how determines whether we actually complete something.

Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God's property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.

Extinction has only separated groups: it has by no means made them; for if every form which has ever lived on this earth were suddenly to reappear, though it would be quite impossible to give definitions by which each group could be distinguished from other groups, as all would blend together by steps as fine as those between the finest existing varieties, nevertheless a natural classification, or at least a natural arrangement, would be possible.

There are as many species as the infinite being created diverse forms in the beginning, which, following the laws of generation, produced many others, but always similar to them: therefore there are as many species as we have different structures before us today.

Hereafter we shall be compelled to acknowledge that the only distinction between species and well-marked varieties is, that the latter are known, or believed to be connected at the present day by intermediate gradations whereas species were formerly thus connected.

A single tree in the tropical forest in the south of Mexico has more different species than some European countries.

There are some four million different kinds of animals and plants in the world. Four million different solutions to the problems of staying alive.

Searching for alternative life on Earth might seem misconceived, because there is excellent evidence that every kind of life so far studied evolved from a common ancestor that lived billions of years ago. Yet most of the life that exists on Earth has never been properly classified.

Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again and again, independently - the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs 'good tricks.'

Pretty much every plant and animal alive today is the result of eons of natural cross-breeding.

Following the creation concept that creation processes differed from preservation processes, it is suggested that God endowed each created kind, at the time of its creation, with potential for vast variety.

If you want to study one of these strange organisms, you had better have a good justification. It's not good to study gene organisation in some obscure insect that no one's ever heard about.